I turned the frame over with my hands shaking. Taped to the back was an index card in the same handwriting. Lily Grace. Born June 4, 2021. And under it, a phone number.
I did not call it that day. I called my sister.
Ruth answered on the first ring like she had been waiting three years for it. She came over that night and sat on my couch and told me everything.
In 2020 my son met a girl named Tasha when he was working in Columbus. She got pregnant. She was going through a hard time, the kind of hard time you do not want your mother to know about, and she was getting help and getting better. My son wanted to wait until she was on her feet and they had custody papers settled before he brought them home. He was afraid I would judge her. He was afraid I would push. He was probably right.
Ruth is a paralegal. He went to her for help with the papers. And he made her promise not to tell me until he was ready.
He was going to bring them home that Christmas. The accident was in October.
My son had a daughter for three years, and I found out from the back of a picture frame.
I was angry. I will not pretend I was not. I was angry at Ruth for a week. Then I was angry at myself, because I knew why he did it, and I knew I had given him reasons.
The funeral director told me the woman who claimed the second urn was Tasha. She came four days after the service because she did not think she had the right to come to it.
I called the number on the card on a Sunday afternoon. A young woman answered, and when I said who I was, she was quiet for so long I thought the call dropped. Then she said she was so sorry. And then she said Lily had his eyes.
I drove to Columbus the next weekend. Tasha has been clean for four years now. She works at a pharmacy and rents a little house with a swing set in the back. She keeps his urn on a shelf in the living room next to a picture of him holding Lily at the hospital.
Lily was five by then. She came to the door in a pair of rain boots on a sunny day and looked up at me and said, are you my daddy mom?
I said yes, baby, I am.
She took my hand and walked me straight to her room to show me her fish.
I go every other weekend now. Tasha brings her down for holidays. Ruth comes too, and Lily calls her Aunt Ruth, and I have forgiven her, because she kept her word to my boy.
He did not get to do it the way he wanted. But he did it. He made sure she would find me.